A Virtual Web of Knowledge

Students, teachers and anyone worldwide with a craving for graduate-level courses on theoretical physics have a valuable, free resource: online lectures from ICTP's Postgraduate Diploma Programme. Produced by ICTP's Science Dissemination Unit (SDU), the online lectures show a curious, ongoing trend amongst their users: although targeted mainly to ICTP's Diploma students on-campus and to scientists in the developing world who have scarce learning resources, the web courses are being viewed by more people in developed and emerging countries, especially Europe and the United States.

Available since 2007, the online courses--on topics ranging from basic and high energy physics to condensed matter and mathematics--are captured from classes taught each year at ICTP to groups of Diploma students who represent the brightest young scientists from developing countries. Since ICTP launched its Diploma Programme in 1991, 788 students from 71 countries have participated, many of whom have continued their education at leading universities throughout the world to attain their PhDs.

The idea to record the Diploma courses and place them online was a challenge that reflected ICTP's mission to support scientific excellence in the developing world. The web offerings would dramatically expand the reach of the Diploma Programme, allowing budding scientists anywhere in the world the same access to knowledge as those students based at ICTP in Trieste. Also, it was the first time any institute had offered complete, on-line courses of such high-levels of educational content in physics and mathematics free of charge.

From 2007 to August of this year, ICTP's nearly 12,000 hours of online Diploma Programme lectures have received more than 1 million unique visitors. Contrary to what one might expect, the majority of visits to the web courses comes from computers connected from Italy (22%), USA (12%) and India (9%). Following close behind is China (3%) and Africa, mainly in Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and Rwanda (about 1%).

These numbers suggest that the lectures, taught in English by ICTP scientists, are a useful learning resource for students both in developing and developed countries. Some parts of the world, however, are restricted both by language barriers and bandwidth constraints. To tackle these two issues, SDU has implemented the new Project "Didactica para el Desarrollo" with educational scientific lectures in different languages, and has sent hard disks containing terabytes of recorded lectures to countries in need like North Korea and Pakistan.

All Diploma courses are recorded using ICTP's automated, open source recording system, called Enhance your Audience (EyA), which SDU developed. EyA makes such an endeavor technologically possible and fiscally practical, as it requires no camera operators and no post production. One year of lectures used about one Terabyte of disk space, which today costs less than 100 Euro. And the cost of an hour of recording is only few cents per hour.

In the near future, SDU plans to expand the online lectures to an even broader audience by translating the recordings into French in collaboration with ICTP associate Laure Gouba. Gouba is from the African country of Burkina Faso where, like many developing countries in Africa, the common language is French. So by translating the lectures, ICTP is expanding the audience to which it caters its on-line courses.